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All About Camp Stimey

Well, it’s summer. Or spring break. Or any gaping amount of time when you are desperate to make your kids participate in any activity that doesn’t include watching TV, hitting their brothers, or whining at you, which completely harshes the summer buzz.

It’s okay. I am here to help.

Each summer, with varying levels of success, I plan Camp Stimey, an at-home summer program designed to keep your kids learning and having fun while keeping them the hell off of your back. Camp Stimey (or Camp [insert your family nickname here]) involves work, but it’s worth it.

Following are summaries of each of the theme weeks Team Stimey has participated in, with links to relevant posts, detailing the disasters and/or successes of each.

I will update this post at the completion of each week, so if you don’t find something to your liking yet, come back in a couple of weeks and check again!

Please feel free to leave suggestions for future Camp Stimey activities in the comments. Did you do at-home camp with a successful theme? Let me know what you did and I will shamelessly steal the idea for myself.

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The Origin of it All: I’m going to be honest here and tell you that I originally stole this idea from my friend, Lindsay, and have since given her almost no credit for her suggestion. This is how Camp Stimey, orginally Camp Here and Now, came to be way back in 2008.

Transportation Week: This is one of my favorite weeks of all times. Most kids can really get behind this and there are so many methods of transportation to choose from that you are almost guaranteed to find fun activities no matter where you live. You can read my summary post of the whole week and a more in-depth post about Day Five: Bus Day.

We started with Train Day, which included a ride on a miniature train at a local park. Day Two was Aviation Day, during which we made paper airplanes and visited the College Park Aviation Museum, a local repository of all things airplane. Day Four was Boat Day. We went to a nearby lake that offers rental boats, including the most small-child friendly of the boats, the pedal boat. Be forewarned: You will do all of the pedaling. Day Five, of course, was Disguise an Errand as Bus Day.

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Government and History Week: This is a very easy theme to conduct if you live in the DC Metro area. It may be harder if you live in, say, Ruralville, North Dakota. But I believe in you, faithful campers! You can do it! You can read about my ideas for this week in my Coming Attractions post. There are a lot of easy things to teach your kids about government including the three branches of government and basic history. Schoolhouse Rock can help you out a lot here. I like to schedule this week around July 4th, but the problem with that is that everyone else does too. Your local attractions will be busy that week.

Speaking of failures, now might be the time to mention those. We went letterboxing, unsuccessfully our first time, successfully the second, and we attempted to create homemade stalagmites and stalactites. That didn’t work either. I also attempted to dye sand so we could make sand art. That also didn’t go so well.

This week also featured our first Camp Stimey Meet-Up, which is a fun way to meet some new people in your area, or even people you already know. We went to a local nature center. Aside from some customary Team Stimey shenanigans, I’m going to count this one as a success.

Our biggest outing was to Luray Caverns, where you can tour a giant underground cave. If you live near any caverns, check them out. This was a high point of our summer. I hope to go back sometime soon.

Colonial Week: This is a good week to do if you live anywhere near Virginia. It might be harder elsewhere, but I’m sure you could try to recreate colonial times in your backyard or make a colonial meal with ease. In fact, the more I write about Camp Stimey, the more I see missed opportunities. Maybe I need a Camp Stimey is Better the Second Time Around Week, where I take advantage of what I learned the first time.

Where Does Our Food Come From Week:This is one of my favorite Camp Stimey weeks of all time. I loved that my kids got to learn a little bit about what happens to food before it gets to the grocery store. I wanted to let Alex handle the first day of this camp by having him force the kids to help him with his vegetable garden, but he took them swimming instead.

Water Week: I had all kinds of plans to teach my kids about oceans and water life during Water Week, but for the most part we just played with water. You can read all about the things we did in my recap post, but here’s a quick round up: We did a lot of swimming, had a water balloon fight, found a local park with a stream in it, visited an aquarium and did some water-related crafts and experiments. For example, we experimented with food coloring in water and then making music by clinking spoons against glasses with different amounts of water in them. We also did some watercolor painting (of aquatic subjects) and made giant stuffed fish.

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Five Senses Week: This week was planned better by me than implemented. It turned out that we got busy and didn’t have a lot of extra time to do activities. Plus, my older sons weren’t too interested in the five senses because they’d already learned all about them at school. This might be a better theme for younger kids. We did do some fun stuff, including thinking about sounds and a general lesson on the overall senses. I had planned to put objects in socks and have my kids feel them, then draw what they thought they were. We were also going to bake for Smell Day and flavor popcorn with salt, sugar, and Parmesan cheese on Taste Day. If you Google “activities for five senses,” you will come up with a plethora of things to do!

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You are now up to date on Camp Stimey. Check back again because I’ll be adding information as we complete more weeks! You can always access this post by clicking on the Camp Stimey button on the top right of the sidebar.

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Stimey believes rodents are funny, autism may be different than you think, and that if you have a choice between laughing and crying, you should always try to laugh—although sometimes you may have to do both.